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Thursday, October 2, 2014

Man on mars

The Red Planethas been
getting a lot of attention recently, between India's low-cost MOM probe
entering Mars's orbit, NASA's MAVEN doing the same, and the Curiosity rover
reaching the most potentially fertile site yet for signs of ancient life. Elon
Musk has even talked about building a city there. For most people who look out
at the night sky and wonder whether we're alone, Mars holds our best hope for
proving that we're not.

The famed futurist,
author, and Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University,
thinks that any sign of life we find on Mars would be a bad sign, an argument
he developed in a 2008 paper entitled "Where Are They?: Why I Hope The
Search For Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing."

He writes:

It would be good news
if we find Mars to be completely sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would
lift my spirit.

Conversely, if we
discovered traces of some simple extinct life form — some bacteria, some algae
— it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps
something looking like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a
small mammal, it would be very bad news.

So, why the apparent
negativity?

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Scientists around the world are hoping that NASA's Curiosity rover will find
silicon in these rocks on Mount Sharp, an indication that this might have once
been an environment for life. Nick Bostrom hopes the rover finds nothing of the
kind.

Simply put, evidence of
life on Mars would suggest that life in the universe is not uncommon, and that
induction would lead to a troubling conclusion.

It all comes down to
the question of why we haven't encountered any signs of intelligent
extraterrestrial life (not to mention any extraterrestrial life whatsoever) — a
quandary originally posed by physicist Enrico Fermi, and known as Fermi's
Paradox. If none of the billion and billions of planets in space has developed
civilizations that are advanced enough to communicate with or be detected by
humans, then there must be something that prevents that from happening.

"There are planets
that are billions of years older than Earth," Bostrom writes. "Any
intelligent species on those planets would have had ample time to recover from
repeated social or ecological collapses. Even if they failed a thousand times
before they succeeded, they could still have arrived here hundreds of millions
of years ago."

Bostrom reasons that
there's a "Great Filter" that must exist either in our past or our
future. If the hard part of becoming an
interstellar civilization is the emergence of life, then the filter is in our
past and humans are entering exciting new territory. But if the emergence of
life is common, then the hard part could be getting through technological
adolescence without destroying ourselves — in which case humanity may be in for
hard times.

Another potential
option is that the same life lived on Mars as does on Earth now. That would
mean that life somehow originated on Mars and was transferred to Earth, or vice
versa. In that case, the origination of life would still be an extremely
improbable event that only happened once. It would thus still be a good
candidate for the Great Filter to have come before current time.

What could have caused other
intelligent alien civilizations to disappear? Bostrom points to risks we face
today:

To constitute an
effective Great Filter, we hypothesize a terminal global cataclysm: an
existential catastrophe. An existential risk is one where an adverse outcome
would annihilate Earth‐originating intelligent
life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential for future
development. We can identify a number of potential existential risks: nuclear
war fought with stockpiles much greater than those that exist today (maybe
resulting from future arms races); a genetically engineered superbug;
environmental disaster; asteroid impact; wars or terrorists act committed with
powerful future weapons, perhaps based on advanced forms of nanotechnology;
superintelligent general artificial intelligence with destructive goals; high‐energy
physics experiments; a permanent global Brave‐New‐World‐like
totalitarian regime protected from revolution by new surveillance and mind
control technologies. These are just some of the existential risks that have
been discussed in the literature, and considering that many of these have been
conceptualized only in recent decades, it is plausible to assume that there are
further existential risks that we have not yet thought of.

It's in light of those
scary possibilities that Bostrom hopes to find more evidence on Mars of the
rareness of life on Earth.

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